jZnat's Journal: Yahoo SBC users can now switch to Firefox and rejoice!

Just a few days ago, I visited a friend's house to help out with his computer woes and to play some videogames. His family is cursed with Yahoo SBC DSL, and thusly was not only infected with spyware as a typical Windows box is, but was also infected with the pile of shit web browser poseur that comes with it. The browser tries to mimic tabbed browsing and all sorts of Web 2.oh sort of magic, but it's painfully obvious that they just developed some sort of hack on top of Internet Explorer.

Now, the weird thing about this web browser is that it doesn't follow Internet Explorer's typical method of saving private items such as bookmarks. A quick Google search didn't find anything helpful regarding this, so I'll divulge what I've figured out. I was eventually able to find his bookmarks in a file called personal.xml, somewhere deep in the bowels of his %APPDATA% directory (check the directories with the name "Yahoo" or "SBC" in them).

So, now we found the bookmarks, right? Well, Internet Explorer normally uses its “Favorites” system, so Firefox knows how to import that with ease, right? But as we all know, “Favorites” are saved in directories with .url files inside (I'm assuming, correct me if I'm wrong), so what's the deal with personal.xml ? Well, Yahoo, being the weirdoes they are, went and created their own XML format for bookmarks when a perfectly good format already exists from Python.

Of course, the good thing about XML is that it can be transformed via XSLT, so I have created (and released to the public domain) an XSLT stylesheet that can transform the Yahoo bookmarks format to XBEL. XBEL can be imported or used by most web browsers these days, so you shouldn't have any issues with that. I plan on creating a version that creates the Netscape bookmark format for backwards compatibility, but since that it basically some butchered form of HTML, it might be slightly more difficult to create an actual XSLT for it.

If anyone wishes to make a web interface for this, please let me know that you did as well so that I don't do it redundantly.